(LifeSiteNews) — A former Planned Parenthood executive is suing Planned Parenthood Great Rivers for firing her, allegedly because she anonymously reported an illegal late-term abortion.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that former human resources vice president Jacqueline Colyer says she filed a report with the abortion giant’s anonymous tip line about an “unauthorized abortion at approximately 28 weeks, after the point of viability and outside the facility’s operating hours” at a facility in Fairview Heights, Illinois. “An abortion at approximately 28 weeks, outside operating hours, with no indication it was necessary to protect the patient’s life or health, was contrary to” state law.
The abortion allegedly took place in 2022, and Colyer discovered and reported it in July 2024, according to her wrongful termination suit.
She says she was reprimanded just two weeks after the report, for “insubordination and dishonesty,” and fired less than five months later. Interim chief executive Richard Muniz allegedly told her “I’m sure you know what’s happening. You are not a good fit.”
Her suit maintains that “Under the Illinois Reproductive Health Act, after fetal viability, a health care professional may provide abortion … only if, in the professional’s judgment, it is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.” But giving abortionists themselves the power to decide what constitutes “medical necessity” creates an easily-exploitable loophole that renders abortion bans effectively meaningless, especially in a state as far-left as Illinois. Abortion is also never actually medical necessary, as medical experts have affirmed.
Under Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker, the state has been among the most aggressive in the union in shoring up virtually unlimited abortion. Last June, he signed legislation to ensure that abortion pills remain legal in the state even if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration withdraws approval, and last year he celebrated “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” with a “thank you” to “doctors, nurses, clinic staff and volunteers” involved in abortions for their “compassion,” despite Illinois abortionists’ record of putting women in emergency rooms via abortion procedures in addition to killing unborn babies. In February, he announced a partnership with the Michael Reese Health Trust to form the “Prairie State Access Fund” to subsidize abortions further still.
As a result, Illinois continued to supply more abortions to out-of-state visitors than any other state in 2025, according to data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. Illinois saw 32,000 abortions for non-Illinois residents, representing 23 percent of the 142,000 total abortions committed for women traveling across state lines last year.
The lawsuit also highlights how, contrary to pro-abortion talking points, late-term abortion is a very real phenomenon, and offers an example of how it is done in ways that official figures don’t necessarily capture.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reviewed by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, while more than 90 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester, more than 50,000 abortions a year take place after 15 weeks (almost four months into pregnancy), and approximately 10,000 after 20 weeks (five months).
Further, contrary to pro-abortion narratives, most of these abortions are not sought for extreme medical emergencies. A 2013 Guttmacher report admitted “data suggests that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” and notorious late-term abortionist Warren Hern’s own published data found that “abnormalities” ranged from just a fifth to a third of his clients – and that the most common of those was Down syndrome, a condition that is neither a death sentence nor even a guarantee of an unhappy life. Yet for years congressional Democrats have consistently voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban most abortions after five months.